That'll show him!

REUTERS

KEY WEST, Fla. A tiny flotilla of Cuban exiles sailed toward international waters near Cuba Wednesday to toss flowers and human rights pamphlets into the sea in protest against Fidel Castro's May Day celebration.

Ooooo, soggy pamphlets. Castro must be shaking in his boots....

Helmut Kohl is in Britain. They gave him a nice big plate of British beef, with no alternative dish prepared. Fortunately for their little publicity stunt, none of the German delegation turned out to be vegetarians. (I'm trying to think of a segue to Hitler having been a vegetarian, but I can't)

Do you think Governor Engler will be denied the chance to be Dole's running mate solely on the basis that he was too fat to be drafted to go to Vietnam?

The Alabama Prison Commissioner, renouned for making prisoners who masturbate in front of female guards wear pink uniforms, has resigned in disgust because they wouldn't let him start up female chain gangs (evidently the state is being sued by male prisoners for discrimination).

Dole, continuing the attack on judges that Clinton so skillfully turned aside last month by caving like a kleenex full of snot, said yesterday that the Supreme Court is just one appointment away from being the most liberal court since Warren.

Clinton may not be able to stand up to Dole, but he sure gets tough on 13-year old girls who get in his way. When those 2 were arrested for sending him crank letters a week ago, I really thought it would be laughed out of court by now, but no....

I understand Dole is now taking warmth lessons. "Bob Dole feels your pain." Rather like when they locked LBJ in a room for six months to teach him to say negro. "Niggra-o." "No, no. Try again, Mr. President." (old Dick Gregory joke, I believe)

Did you see where Mississippi is mandating equal admissions standards for all its public universities, ensuring a 50% drop in black enrollment in the 3 traditionally-black U's?

So Judge Baer reversed himself. Not because of all the intense political pressure of course, but because of new evidence, including the testimony of a cop that blatantly contradicted his written report after the arrest. And Clinton suggests that all he did was to comment on the case, as if he had never threatened to demand the judge's resignation. Judicial integrity is being beaten like a dark-skinned person after a chase in southern California.

Tony Blair: "Our government will fail if it sees its task as dismantling Thatcherism." Boris Yeltsin: "No one with a heart can but regret the end of the Soviet Union. No one with a head can think of creating an exact copy." And US reform rabbis voted to support gay marriages but not actually to perform them.

The House ethics committee gave Gingrich another walk, without
questioning anyone or examining any documents.

Did you see where the law against "partial birth abortions" was so badly written that a) its definition included other types of abortion, b) its exclusion to save the life of the mother wasn't one, because it specified if the life was endangered by a physical disorder or such, but most women who have late-term abortions are threatened by the actual pregnancy, which is not a physical disorder.

The Treasury Dept forbids its law-enforcement officers to exhibit any bias off-duty on basis of sex, religion, etc etc. Intended to keep them from the Good Ol' Boys Roundup, it's actually so broad as to punish ethnic jokes, say, told privately.

What does it take nowadays to be insane?

What about Daumer? Don't you have to wonder about a state in which someone who kills loads of people and keeps them in the fridge for munchies and the court says, nope, not insane, seems perfectly reasonable behaviour to me. I'd hate to meet the real loons in that state.

Favorite news stories of the week: mad cows and Englishmen (yes you have less chance of catching mad cow disease from a Wimpyburger than of winning the lottery, but have you noticed how popular the lottery is?); the rise in cannibalism in Russia; the report that the Federal Reserve is horribly mismanaging its own budget; the 58-yr old black female cashier of the Senate coffee shop fired for calling her customers baby, sweetheart, and such, a complaint being filed by an aide to...Mitch McConnell. Sonny (I got you, babe) Bono is running scared.

After vituperating at President Lee for months, China is now suggesting that his reelection is a vindication of the one-China policy, so they've won anyway. Speaking of political reality, some of the op-ed pieces in the NY Times calling on Lee to accommodate China more, and coming from good liberals like Thomas Friedman and I think Anthony Lake and the Times itself, sound an awful like the advice the west offered Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Speaking of which, Germany recently refused to acknowledge that the Munich agreement of 1938 was illegal.

Sorry, this was a NY case, so I guess it gets more coverage there, though I thought of it as a national story. A judge excluded a trunkfull of cocaine and heroine saying that the police did not have reasonable cause to pull over a car that a bunch of men were putting bags into the trunk of at 5 in the morning, and that since Washington Heights police were known to be thugs (which is very true), it was not unreasonable for the men to run away. Not surprisingly, a lot of ink has been spilled over this case the last month. The judge is Harold Baer, Southern District of NY, appointed by Clinton 1994, and Clinton just ordered him to reverse himself or resign (not that Clinton can make him, of course), since Republicans intend to go after him on his judicial appointments. Newt demanded that Clinton ask for the resignation, Dole has been mentioning it. All this including the Clinton threat comes in advance of a rehearing. Mike McCurry is going after Reagan and Bush judges as being
too soft on crime (the judges who struck down Megan's law, the SF judge who wants drugs legalized....)

Incidentally, Pataki removed a Bronx district attorney for refusing to act within his discretion to ask for the death penalty for a man who killed a cop.

Another month, another proposed constitutional amendment from the
Republicans. I know the constitution isn't etched in stone, but on an etch-a-sketch?

Now even Fed Courts of Appeal can ignore the Supreme Court and set their own affirmative action policy, so why don't you try to persuade the 9th district to follow the 5th?

What must John Gummer be thinking today, the former British Agriculture Minister who fed his 4-year old daughter a hamburger on national tv to prove that British beef was safe despite the mad cow disease.

The House voted to let states deny public education to children of illegal immigrants, including those born in the US (the latter by a vote of 269-151, actually higher than for the bill as a whole), proving that they too can ignore the Supreme Court.

A Texas grand jury decides that a man taking advantage of the new
concealed weapons law to settle a traffic accident dispute with extreme prejudice was within his rights. Not even a trial.

In Berkeley I saw a sign for a candidate for Assembly who proposes to abolish the IRS.

I've been trying to pick someone for superior court judge from the meaningless candidate statements. So I'm asking myself whether the one whose law degree came from Catholic University Columbus School of Law would be against the death penalty. I may wind up voting for the one I know was a defense attorney, who still somehow tries to fool the death penalty voters by noting that "My last case before taking the bench was a death penalty jury trial." I can see a thousand voters underlining death
penalty with highlight markers and voting for him. My mother says she has someone who brags that as a judge he saved taxpayer money by sentencing people at the prelims. Um, doesn't that mean he just ratified plea agreements, or is this some new thing implemented by Dan Lungren to eliminate juries. In LA, you could see how that might be popular. I personally blame whatever consultant took the Menendez brothers out of their cable-knit sweaters and into suits and ties for their conviction.

I've decided to vote in favor of giving unemployment insurance to prisoners.

Maybe we could send our mountain lions to Australia and thus solve our lion problem and their koala problem at the same time?

An alternate juror in the Whitewater case was expelled, not because she'd worn her home-made Star Trek uniform to court every day, but for talking to TV about it. She evidently wears it to all formal occasions.

Thu, 7 Mar 1996

The Village Voice, commenting on a Forbes reference to the liberal media distorting his flat tax idea, notes that of the remaining candidates, Keyes and Dornan are radio hosts, Buchanan is a columnist and is on CNN, and Forbes owns a multibillion dollar media empire.

Question I'd have liked to hear someone ask Dole when he was posing with George Bush yesterday: "So, is he lying about your record now?"

Buchanan says that he will look like something out of Deliverance...

Yesterday I found the lock-picking web-site and Dave's Web of Lies, on which everything is guaranteed to be inaccurate.

Today I have found "Dave's Web of Lies" on which everything is guaranteed to be false, and the Web-site containing a guide to lock-picking. Contrary to my assumption that the latter would turn out to be a joke, it does indeed seem to be a guide to lock-picking. Just in case you were looking for a new career.

I have also been running into problems relating to the Web-browser I am using more frequently today than is usual. When you choose an option from the British comedian/actor/writer/show-off's home page called Instant Orgasm, and the result is a message that this cannot be displayed on your screen, well, disappointment hardly begins to describe it.

Former Governor Carroll Campbell of S Carolina on Lamar Alexander: "I don't think people perceive him as a fellow-Southerner. They perceive him as a nice guy."

Another great Republican debate. C'mon Dole, should a raped woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or not. I understand that Dole will soon hit his legal spending limit, thanks to Forbes. Did you hear that Alan Keyes went on hunger strike to protest being left out of the debate? I knew Dick Gregory; Dick Gregory was a friend of mine... While inside, Buchanan kept trying to get everyone to join him in a chorus of
Dixie...

And despite Laurence Taylor's comment that no matter how useful this is supposed to be for our research we all wind up looking first thing in the Frisky Lesbians section, 1) it was the second thing I look for, 2) it doesn't seem to exist.

Nothing in the British papers today except learned disquisitions on how Diana can be Princess of Wales but not be Her Royal Highness. Well at least she still has the castle.

And does anyone think that those Cubans were looking for boat people in February?

I trust you've seen the story about the Salt Lake school district banning all student clubs.

Dole has a new ad accusing Lamar Alexander of being too liberal. "He even signed a bill allowing violent criminals to be eligible for parole after serving less than half their prison sentence." Actually that was an increase....

The Times suggests that Quentin Davies (I love British politicians' names. Esp compared with US, where MacNeil-Lehrer today talks with Congressman Zack Wamp [pronounced womp]) voted against the gov. on the Scott Report out of pique with one of the 2 ministers in question, William Waldegrave, who was Minister of Agriculture when Davies was fined for cruelty to sheep. For the past 5 yrs, Labour MPs always "baa baa" whenever he speaks in Parliament.

And the new 11th Duke of Atholl is a South African, who now becomes the only man in Britain allowed to keep a private army, the Atholl Highlanders. The guy confesses that he doesn't even own a kilt.

I am watching the college championships of Jeopardy as I write. One category is Winona Ryder films. Sigh.

Director of CIA Deutch says CIA agents will only use journalistic cover if it's really gosh-darned importance. There was a piece in the NY Times by someone once held by Iraq for a week who thought this was not a good idea.

If you haven't been following school desegregation in South Africa, now would be a good time. I'd suggest the Jo'burg Star, if that's on-line.

The Guardian material is great. The problem is that the government refused to let anyone in the opposition see the Scott report before its release, except the Shadow Foreign Secretary, who was locked in a room with it 3 hours before its release, which is fairly useless for an 1,800-page document, especially when it's written in that excessively tentative, convoluted style so beloved of the British civil service. It's hard to tell yet how much damage this report has inflicted. The government is claiming exoneration, which is fairly laughable, but depends on those double negatives and subordinate clauses, and statements that Scott accepts that ministers really believed what they were saying, despite mountains of evidence that what they were saying was horse puckey. In drawing conclusions, this guy goes to the opposite extreme of Al D'Amato.

Did you see where Yeltsin announced that only he could save Russia from authoritarianism on the same day he fired the head of state television for critical reports on Chechnya?

I understand that Henry Hyde included in the Communications Bill a provision extending the Comstock Act to the Internet. How could the Comstock Act possibly still be on the books?

I'm enjoying the beginning of the primary season. Evidently Gramm's goose is cooked based on the 21,500 representing the 5% of Louisiana's Republicans who showed up at the caucuses.

Speaking of geese, Forbes said that if all the people in China ate two more eggs a week, it would take all the grain produced in a year in Australia. Gramm said if everybody in China ate one more chicken a year, it would take the entire soybean crop of Illinois to feed that chicken. As the New York Times puts it, "That's some chicken." Lamar Alexander says that if Chinese ate more chicken and pork, they'd require the entire Nebraska grain crop. Sounds like the SATs to me.

OK, just to test the provision that it's illegal to mention abortion on the Internet (which the BBC caught about 5 days before the New York Times, I might add), did you know that last year the governor of New Hampshire vetoed a bill to ban the use of force, threats and intimidation by anti-abortion protesters?

And speaking of China, last year they extended the death penalty to the offense of faking value-added tax forms, according to the Economist.

Speaking of which, I've noticed that I have access to some sort of editing program, the sort that checks for grammar and syntax
and...sexism. Ah, Berkeley!

There's a Charles Addams cartoon. Under a banner saying Class of 1954 stand an assortment of bums, winos and the like, and one says to another, "You know, I always thought it was just me, but maybe the school's no damn good."